


Nonlinear Control

by Minette



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Anal Sex, Dom/sub Play, Footnotes, Linguistics, M/M, Mathematics, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 17:19:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6865876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minette/pseuds/Minette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reid visits Hotch for their usual platonic impact play, but this time he's got another kind of banging (along with a cornucopia of interesting mathematical and linguistic trivia) in mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nonlinear Control

**Author's Note:**

> This is like an alternative universe version of chapter 12 of [Toeing the Line](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6610786) \- fanfic of the fanfic if you will - and the relationship between Hotch and Reid here will make a lot more sense if you've already read that. If you'd prefer not to, the short version is: Reid tells Hotch when to hit him and when to stop. Despite some confusion when first negotiating things, it's totally almost completely platonic.

Spencer likes Hotch's apartment number1. It's a palindrome, the square of a palindrome, and the root of yet another palindrome. In addition to being the square of a prime it's also (like Spencer's apartment number2) the sum of three consecutive primes. It's also a Smith number, a Friedman number, a star number—

He scowls at himself and makes himself knock on the door. It's kind of ridiculous to still be nervous after doing this thirteen times already (he finds it interesting to note that the number of occasions he's knocked is the same as the number of occasions Hotch has hit him even though the two sets aren't identical) although possibly being nervous is inextricably linked to the psychology that drove him to propose this in the first place. That is, if he was more confident with physical confrontations he wouldn't feel the urge to challenge himself by courting it, or the frankly incredible head-rush when the terror of being vulnerable bursts into the realisation that he really is the one controlling it all.

Despite thinking this he nearly panics when the door handle turns. They're meant to meet by mutual agreement and Hotch hasn't agreed to him coming tonight. Let alone—

But Hotch doesn't look surprised to see him. He only lets him in and leaves him to close the door, saying, "I'll brush my teeth. You don't want a faceful of my dinner."

There's no smell of food in the apartment. In his nervousness Spencer blurts out the obvious deduction: "You ate on the way home?" Then he winces. Where Hotch eats is none of his business.

"Yeah," Hotch says as he heads around a corner, and adds drily, "I forgot to ask them to hold the onion."

Spencer's never seen him so tired he'd have onion on his sandwich. Probably not even after he almost got blown up in New York. Guiltily he says, "Sorry, I know it's late. I— I just couldn't sleep."

"I'll just be a minute," is all Hotch says from the corridor, and shuts a door.

Spencer stands awkwardly alone in his supervisor's living room. There's an invisible line on a diagonal between the table and the whiskey on its sideboard which he's never gone past. He turns away from it now. The bookshelves draw him, but bookshelves can give a tremendous insight into their owner's personality and he's not sure Hotch would be comfortable with him rummaging through them while he's out of the room. So he sits on the couch instead.

He wonders if part of the reason Hotch has retreated to the bathroom is to reclaim the privacy Spencer's just intruded on. He shouldn't have come. He knows Hotch is conflicted about what they do and often needs to work up to it, so springing it on him isn't very fair. And especially springing on him what Spencer's been thinking about all evening — or actually for the last two hundred and forty-four3 days and one hour — can only go one of two ways, he realises now that he's here.

Either Hotch will completely freak out, and although this isn't a state of mind Spencer would have ever associated with him until he saw him pull over on the interstate and basically flee the car, he's more familiar with the reaction now and knows it has the potential not only to curtail tonight but maybe even put an end to these visits entirely.

Or Hotch might actually agree, in which case probably Spencer will be the one freaking out, or quite possibly having an actual panic attack and that will have the same effect because Hotch will never feel safe again trusting him to control this.

So logically Spencer shouldn't bring it up. Or let it come up, which it will if while Hotch is hitting him he finds what Spencer brought in his pockets in a doomed attempt to force himself to bring it up. He shoves the whole handful quickly down between two cushions. He'll need to retrieve it all later, but he can ask Hotch to fetch some juice to get him out of the room. Then Hotch will think he wants to talk about something, but... maybe if he brings it up when they're both high on endorphins neither of them will freak out and they can have a rational conversation.

Except probably what will really happen is Spencer will get nervous and not say anything just like he hasn't said anything for the last two hundred and forty-four days and most likely won't ever say anything next time either. Which isn't a bad thing because what they're doing already is good too, it's just he really wishes he was more confident.

He realises he's scrubbing at his eyes and pulls his hands down. Hotch is back, and watching him. His heart skips a beat, but Hotch can't _really_ read minds. It's late, eye irritation is to be expected. He blurts, "You were probably going to bed."

"I probably wouldn't have slept," Hotch says drily, and watches him stand up too. "You really sleep better covered in bruises?"

"Um, not really, but the dreams aren't as— They're different, so that's better."

"Do you always sleep on your back?"

"Mostly I don't, actually, it's just on the jet it's eas—" He stutters to silence because Hotch is striding to him now — grabbing his arm and hauling him — shoving him at the back of the couch—

It drives all the air out of him. Bent double under Hotch's hand, he flails in alarm: if it's hit his solar plexus like the first time Hotch punched him and he can't breathe then he can't tell Hotch to stop. His hands are busy trying to brace himself without getting tangled in his hair. Their panicked clumsiness rules out alternative communication methods like ASL, braille, New York Point4, semaphore, though if he can coordinate his foot he could kick the couch dah-dit dah-dah-dah5—

Hotch lands a sharp smack to his buttocks. He yelps at the crack and sting of it. But yelping indicates at least some autonomic control over his diaphragm, so he inhales experimentally. There's no room to fully inflate his lungs but a shallow breath works — in time for another smack to startle it out as another yelp.

Inhale— Smack. Inha— Smack. In— Smack.

In desperation he locks his throat to give himself time to think: he _can_ breathe and he can make sounds so he can shape his mouth to give those sounds meaning if he needs Hotch to stop, or speak ingressively6 if it's urgent. It isn't yet. He sucks a quick gasp in, not quick enough to stop Hotch smacking it straight out of him again, but the fact that Hotch waited for him to take it lets a great deal of the initial panic subside.

He repeats the experiment, and also discovers his fists brace better against the cushion than flat palms. Gasps and yelps may be an abnormal respiratory pattern but as long as he avoids hyperventilating they'll keep the oxygen circulating.

Gasp— Smack! He waits to breathe, feeling the flare of pain ease to ache, checking with his foot — he actually can't straighten his leg enough at this angle to reach the couch with it, which makes him anxiously inh—

Smack! _Wait_ to breathe, he tells himself quickly. And realises he could just stomp on the floor if he needs to. Or pound the couch now his hands are under control. Or as a last resort kick backwards at Hotch: even if he actually connected it probably wouldn't hurt but it might startle him long enough for Spencer to scramble away.

Gasp— Smack! Wait: and with respiration and contingency plans covered the pain itself is bearable. Last time Hotch spanked him, up against the wall, it left him so sore he felt it sitting down all the next day, but it took a while to get there.

Ga— _Smack!_ forces a more indignant yelp from him. He's either fallen into too much of a pattern (Hotch falls into patterns too, but later) or his muscles are tensing under Hotch's other hand just before he inhales. This calls for a feint: the intention to breathe but not the actual breath. He feels Hotch tense too, and hears the brief rustle of his jacket before he catches himself. _Then_ Spencer gulps in his breath, and nearly fills his lungs before Hotch retaliates with three hard swats in rapid succession.

Which ...raises another problem. Between the positioning of his body over the couch, the direction of Hotch's blows, and the slight yield of the leather under his groin, the sensation of friction and pressure is distinctly suggestive, even arousing. Especially because he can't help but remember (like he has been for the last two hundred forty-four days) Hotch's voice in the shadows: _put you butt-naked over my knee and spank you red as a beet, then throw you over the back of the sofa and pound into your burning hot ass_.

 _Fuck_ , he thinks, and at the next smack has to choke down his yelp to keep from saying it aloud. People always stare at him when he swears, as if he's supposed to know more intelligent ways to express himself when actually expletives are among the most versatile means of expression in existence and incredibly functional. In fact forthcoming research shows profanity has analgesic properties7, though it's not clear whether this is a response to the taboo nature of the words or the phonemic features shared by the most popular ones. Either way it's a fascinating field of study, and then if you think about the syntax for which scatolinguists have had to create a whole new part of speech8 as well as the way expletive infixation9 is unique in the English lang—

"Nng!" The mingled pain and pleasure cut that chain of thought short. He still doesn't actually enjoy the pain itself, but it's not that intense yet, and the endorphins they trigger and the bloodflow stimulated to the area almost certainly intensifies the pleasure. He should tell Hotch to stop and hit his back instead. He really should. Or at least make him wait while Spencer rearranges himself with hands braced on the back of the couch and genitals safely in mid-air: he could talk about the physiological effects of inversion on the circulatory system10 until Hotch hits him again.

But Hotch's next exhalation, a little heavier than usual, alerts Spencer that he's about to speak. "Your pants are in the way." The implication, because Hotch doesn't easily say what he wants directly: he wants it to hurt more, to hear it and Spencer more.

"Yeah," Spencer agrees at once, because it gives him the excuse he wanted to shift to a less sensitive position. And because more pain gets them both more quickly to the headspace where Hotch is barely thinking except to do what Spencer tells him, and where Spencer knows exactly what to say and how to move without doubt or unease.

Fumblingly he pushes himself up and shifts enough to let Hotch undo the buckle of his belt. But when Hotch goes for the zip a dozen thoughts hit him at once: the smell of mown grass and bile, the red of Hotch's palm last time, the black of his dilated pupils two hundred and forty-four ago, _over the back of the sofa and pound_ — "Wait," he says, pulling away and trying to sort through it all, "I—" Is Hotch implying more? Or does Spencer just want him to be? The thought of asking is terrifying, but working through the terror is the whole point of this. "I need to ask something first."

Hotch doesn't stop him from standing up, but knows not to help him either. He barely leaves him space to turn around and face him. He's not out of breath yet even as much as Spencer is, but he is starting to breathe through his mouth: Spencer smells the mint of his toothpaste — and under it a trace of ethanol that instantly changes the question Spencer has to ask.

"Uh," he says, trying to think of a way to ask without Hotch hearing it as an accusal. "Actually two things." The implicature: _It's not a big deal, I just need to know_. "The first one is, how much have you had to drink?"

Hotch's face freezes. Spencer recognises the microexpressions of fear, not anger, but after a half-second pause he says stoically, "One glass."

"Good, then I'm not taking advantage of you. Uh."

 _There's_ the anger, but self-directed. "In what sense could you possibly—"

"My second question," Spencer interrupts, mostly to try and deflect the freak-out but also because it's annoying to have to keep reminding Hotch that Spencer being in control means he _is_ in fact in control, "is—"

"Reid—"

"Stop talking, _I'm_ talking." He expects Hotch to stop and glare, but instead he settles instantly into a docile silence. Spencer feels his own heartrate and respiration increase, both with arousal and the sudden realisation that being in control means he's _in control_ and if Hotch is already in a suggestible state then it doesn't take alcohol to make consent tricky. He has to avoid forcing the choice. "My second question is a choice. You need to tell me which one you want."

Hotch nods biddably.

He swallows and, with due consideration to parallelism11, diction12, prosodics13 and kinesics14, says firmly, "Either you shove my pants down, leave my boxers, and keep hitting me. Or you shove them both down, do the same with yours, and fuck me." Incredibly his voice doesn't break, but he's not controlling his breathing nearly as well. 

Hotch on the other hand stops breathing entirely for six and a half seconds. His pupils, already wide from the exercise, dilate completely. When he does inhale it's with a rasp, and his "Okay," is husky.

Spencer shakes his head in frustration. "It's not a yes-no question. Which one do _you want_?"

"Reid..." His lips move, but hesitate over what words to form. His eyes flick away and back. He manages a helpless, "You really can't tell?"

"No, I—I can't, so we're going to stick with you hitting me and if you want to talk about it later then we'll do that."

"Reid—"

He turns away and gulps a breath and unzips his own fly. He isn't _too_ aroused yet, and planting his hands on the back of the couch as he says, "Go on," keeps him safely off the leather.

Hotch takes his cue: shoves Spencer's pants down — grabs his hips to haul him backwards until he's bent at a nearly ninety-degree angle — and lays in hard and fast. His boxers might as well not be there: in seconds all Spencer can think about is the sudden doubling of the pain, and stopping his yelps from turning into howls that might disturb the neighbours, and keeping his knees and elbows from buckling, and when he tries to scramble away Hotch (breathing quicker now) pulls him from one side and from the other only spanks him _harder_.

His hand slips on the leather and he stumbles with his pants around his ankles, and suddenly Hotch is shoving him upside down over the couch again. As he gasps for breath to protest, Hotch says roughly, "You didn't ask that without being prepared."

"Wh—What—?"

"Keys are in your right pocket. Left's empty. So—" He lunges and scoops between the cushions, and emerges with the condoms, lube, and gloves.

Spencer pushes himself up in flushed alarm. "Hotch—"

Hotch shoves him back down with that hand full of prophylactics and smacks him twice more to keep him there. "Gloves are a nice touch. And what I _want_ , Reid," he says, punctuating this with another smack, "if you _remember_ , is to spank you red as a beet _and_ fuck you. And that—"

Spencer expects another smack here, but Hotch is as suddenly turning away, leaving him with the fierce ache and the equally insistent need. Valid consent15 has three components: informedness, which they've both covered; freedom from coercion, which Spencer's done his best to ensure; and decisional capacity, which in turn requires understanding, appreciation, reasoning — this is the tricky one because maybe Hotch just profiled him but Hotch could profile him in his sleep—

"Is what I'm going to do," says Hotch, constituting expressed choice. He plants a dining chair to one side of them and dumps Spencer's things on it. "Okay?"

Spencer's clawed his way halfway up again, enough to crane for a glimpse of him shrugging off his jacket. His gaze, locked on Spencer, is terrifyingly intense, but there's a flicker of uncertainty which suggests he is thinking about this and not just reacting.

As Hotch hangs his jacket on the back of the chair and adds his tie, Spencer assesses his own condition: heartrate and respiration elevated but regular; adrenaline, lactic acid, sensation of pain all well within tolerance; memory of Catullus 1616 17 and ability to multiply large primes still intact; erection back with a vengeance. He eases himself off the leather without turning. "Not... No more spanking pressed up against this. A—and lots of lube."

"Sure," Hotch says, voice warm. He's still unbuttoning his collar and rolling up his sleeves with no sign of wanting Spencer to stop him. "It's about impact, not friction."

Spencer gulps. "Yes. I mean, okay."

"Better get a good grip then," Hotch warns. He puts his watch last on the chair.

Spencer grasps the couch again and shuffles his feet, careful not to trip in his pants, until he's in a structurally stable position. "Go," he says.

Immediately Hotch yanks his boxers down with no regard for the rasp of elastic on his abused buttocks or the even more intense friction on his cock.

Spencer mewls and Hotch chuckles. —A hot and cold surge of nausea hits him at the sound, full-body flush despite the cool air around all his private parts. He wrestles with the panic, trying to think: What does he need to calm— "Yours too."

"In a minute."

"Now," he snaps, glaring at the beige carpet to ground himself. He focuses on the sounds of the belt buckle, the zip, the fabric shoved down over skin. It does help when he knows Hotch is as vulnerable as him, albeit certainly less prone to tripping. "Okay, now spank me."

Hotch inhales, pushes Spencer's shirt-tails up to hold them out of the way against his ribs, and obeys. Without even cotton in the way the sound is even louder, the sting even sharper. He picks a steadier pace this time, and works from top left in boustrophedon18. Spencer clamps his eyes shut again, holding tight and breathing and whimpering in his throat.

As Hotch works down to parts of the thighs he didn't reach before, he kicks at Spencer's right sneaker. "Get it off."

"Make me," Spencer retorts. He'll be perfectly happy to be clear of the tangle of pants, but he's seriously got enough to think about without coordinating his own disrobing too.

So Hotch gives him two more burning whacks, then kneels abruptly to grasp his ankle and tug the sneaker off. Spencer managers to keep his balance even when Hotch wrestles his pants and boxers off the same leg, then almost loses it when Hotch yanks his legs apart and starts slapping his way up the inside of his calves, one leg then the other, up past his knees, and—

"H—Ho—Hotch!"

"Mm," he agrees, pausing — "missed a spot" — and smacks up at Spencer's right buttock again. Before Spencer finishes his "Ow!" he's back slapping inside his thighs, up, and up, and—

The deft snap of a glove. Spencer didn't even notice him reaching for it. The next smack stings differently: the latex, and the angle. Hotch experiments with it a little, then switches back to his left hand while he reaches for the lube. Then he jams his hip up against Spencer's butt for several seconds while his hands are busy with the bottle. His skin feels cool against the inflammation. Spencer takes the chance to refresh his grip and stance, which doesn't stop Hotch kicking his legs even wider apart.

Then a hot smack, and the next instant the cold lube between his legs makes him yelp a second time. A smear of it cool on his hot right cheek drags a moan from what's left of his breath.

A noise comes from Hotch's throat too. "More?"

"Disambiguate," he gasps. But in the brief confused pause he decides it doesn't matter. "Keep going."

"Stop me if it tears," Hotch says, and again slaps, and as Spencer relaxes from his flinch pushes _in_.

Another slap drives Spencer off the finger; the next moment it's thrusting back in and deeper. Another slap, another thrust; slap; thrust; slap—

His skin burns — not just where Hotch has slapped but all over — and his breathing is unsteady from the overwhelming sensations: the pain alternating with the strange working on muscles used to operating in the other direction. It's amazing to feel his body respond so strongly despite the absence of any actually pleasurable stim—

He gasps when Hotch hits his prostrate, and buckles at the knees, and one hand slips damply off the leather.

"Jesus," Hotch says, grabbing his hip to hold him up for another—

"Wait." His hands are too sweaty for this. He stumbles forward to brace against his forearms instead, and calculates how hard he's got already and how much longer he's going to need to last. Contracting the pubococcygeus muscle should help, and possibly thinking about the sociolinguistic factors influencing individuals' choice of semantic domain in profanity19.

"Okay," he says when he's ready: "More lube and try two."

It also helps when Hotch slaps him again, and breaches him again with two fingers. The effort to relax _and_ stay on his feet makes tears leak from his clenched eyes. He wipes them against a sleeve, and then it's easier to just stay there. To just whimper and gasp with the rhythm of the slaps and thrusts. When the stimulation to his prostate brings him too close, to just say, "Three," and catch his breath in the short moment while Hotch adds lube and starts again.

There's less force behind the first slap, though it hurts his bruised flesh as much. The three fingers enter deeper yet. He tightens his pubococcygeus. "I can't — ah! — see you, how are you feel— Shit, feeling, feeling?"

"Very—" slap, and thrust: "aroused."

Another hot spark shoots from head to toe: Hotch has reached his prostate again, already. The next slap turns his groan into a yelp. "Wait," he adds quickly, and fills his lungs. Every muscle is shaking with exertion. Hotch sounds faintly distracted in his compliance, which would be normal at this stage of the proceedings if sex wasn't involved, but since it is he wants to be sure. "Wh—what do you want next?"

His three fingers stay motionless inside Spencer as he says breathlessly, "To put this condom on, and fuck you into the sofa, until you come so hard you pass out." It's all Spencer can do not to come right then. He does clench down on Hotch's fingers, eliciting another, "Jesus—"

"Four fingers first," he orders alliteratively. The fingers tug out and he has a few more seconds to gulp in breath. Hotch fumbles the bottle putting it down: it clatters onto the carpet. Then the fingers are back without even a halfhearted slap as warning or preparation, shoving in hard and deep and straight to his prostate, and as he cries out he hears the ripping of foil — Hotch spitting the wrapper away — hissing as he pulls back for another thrust—

"Okay, yes, fuck me now." The fingers come all the way out, the glove snaps off and hits the floor, and—

For an instant as he waits, shaking, he imagines Hotch saying as he did two hundred forty-four days ago, _Go to hell_. But then Hotch grabs his hip, shoves his cock in, knocks his arms off the couch back, and bears him forward: arms flailing, breath knocked out, cock jammed into the yielding firmness of the leather. He keens, and Hotch holds him down and pounds deeper, sparking prostrate and cock and tight balls too. "Fuck," he gasps, expletive and imperative both.

"Jesus _Christ_ ," Hotch echoes and does, and does, and does, until the juddering has him awash in fire, and—

Quickly he gasps, "Stop exactly there."

And Hotch stops, exactly there, as if turned to stone but for the tremor of tension in every muscle. With tight breath he groans, "God, Reid, _please_..."

And the world between his temples inverts to encompass all. "Go," he says, and Hotch rams home, and pyrotechnics aren't metaphor, they're synecdoche20—

He doesn't pass out, quite. Distantly he feels Hotch orgasming in him with a cry louder than his own, and collapsing heavily on him. His heart's pounding faster too, but even as Spencer counts the beats they slow. They make a rectangular hyperbola21: Spencer's plotting the points and setting up the differential equations to calculate the function when abruptly the weight and touch and heat and sound are all too much. "Off, get off," he blurts — thinks about falling blood pressure and adds, "Hold the couch."

Hotch still knocks the chair on his way to the farthest extremity of the couch, though Spencer doesn't hear it fall.

Even the air cooling his sweat- and lube-slicked skin prickles unpleasantly. He drags himself up and off the even stickier mess he's left on the couch. "Uh," he says as he bends (ow ow _ow_ ) "sorry about the, uh..."

"It wipes clean," Hotch says dismissively.

"Um," Spencer says at that use of the habitual present22. But probably the antecedent23 of 'it' is the couch, not the sweat and semen. Probably. Anyway he's cold and his backside is killing him, and it's probably best if he just focuses on unknotting his boxers.

He hears Hotch pulling up his own pants, and zipping them, and still the solution eludes his clumsy fingers. "Fuck, this is topologically equivalent to a double-torus24, knot theory25 _says_ this should be possible!"

"Well, I'd offer to help..."

Spencer looks at him suspiciously, but though his voice is warm and he's smiling that's just post-coital euphoria, not laughing at Spencer. "Can you do it without touching me?"

As he clings to the couch, Hotch kneels at his feet like a floor scraper26 and twists the fabric outside in. The movement of it still rasps like sandpaper where it shouldn't be on his left ankle, but then the hole he needs is visible. Hotch locates and lays out the leg of his pants too before standing up.

"Thanks," he says, and gets them on with only the excruciating pain to slow him down.

Hotch pulls his own jacket back on, either as metaphorical armour or against post-exercise chill, but he leaves his tie so probably mostly the latter. When Spencer stuffs the extra condoms and glove back in his pocket Hotch hands him the half-empty bottle of lube from off the floor, and of the soiled glove and condom adds, "I've got the rest."

"Thanks," Spencer says again, and turns to go. At the door he realises this is probably too abrupt and turns back. "Um, really."

"Anytime," Hotch says easily. "—Probably not every time."

"No, definitely." This has been overwhelming in five or six different ways — one of them being how good it was. "Um, but, sometimes?"

Hotch nods, complete with quirked eyebrows, and Spencer hurries out — considering the lexicality of *notime and similarly formed adverbs27 28 — to go home and deal with icepacks and medicated creams before he crashes into a peaceful sleep.

 

 **Footnotes**  
1: [121](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/121_%28number%29) [back]

2: [23](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_%28number%29) [back]

3: Coincidentally [Author's note: yes, really! I picked the number, then looked it up], [244](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/244_%28number%29) is an anti-perfect number. [back]

4: [New York Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Point) has a number of advantages and disadvantages with respect to braille though admittedly the chief disadvantage in this case is the unlikelihood that Hotch is familiar with it. [back]

5: Even if Hotch doesn't know [Morse code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code), he'll at least recognise it as an attempt to communicate. [back]

6: In many languages [ingressive phonemes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingressive_sound) are interpreted differently than their egressive counterparts, but this isn't the case in [General American](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American) so shouldn't present a barrier to communication. [back]

7: In press at the time of these events. However Spencer's been in touch with the researchers and understands them to be preparing a follow-up study investigating the hypothesis that the [effect is stronger for those who swear less often](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoalgesic_effect_of_swearing). [back]

8: There's an incredible blogpost on the [syntax of the f-word](http://the-toast.net/2014/12/09/linguist-explains-syntax-f-word/), you really should read it. [back]

9: And there's another great blogpost on [abso-fuckin'-lutely](http://dexteroustongue.com/861/), complete with cartoons. [back]

10: Admittedly in order to talk for more than three or four minutes on the subject he might have to exaggerate the [risks of inversion therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_therapy#Health_risks) which would normally take more than a few minutes to set in, but Hotch probably wouldn't let him talk that long. [back]

11: Specifically [parallelism of sentence structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelism_%28grammar%29) to avoid any subliminal weighting of one option over the other. [back]

12: Likewise maintaining equivalent levels of [vocabulary choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diction), [back]

13: [intonation, emphasis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29), [back]

14: and [body language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesics), though that's a term dispreferred by linguists because kinesics isn't actually a language per se. [back]

15: [Informed consent and decisional capacity](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/decision-capacity/) quickly run into serious epistomological issues. [back]

16: This is not among the poetry his mother read him. Of course the first line of [the infamous poem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16) is more akin to profanity than a real threat of sexual violence, but the reason Spencer thinks of it right now is because, just as Catullus argues that a poet can write about subjects traditionally considered effeminate and still be the epitome of the masculine, even macho ideal, so Spencer would extend the argument and say that someone can take a role traditionally considered passive or submissive while in reality being the dominant party. In fact he's been developing a theory around how the metaphors used to describe sexual activity encode society's prevalent view of dominance in sexual intercourse regardless of the truth of the matter for any given pair or indeed group of participants, and how an alternative vocabulary could be developed — but that's not really relevant to this story. [back]

17: The footnote numbering is pleasingly coincidental. [16](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_%28number%29) is also interesting because it's both 2 4 and 42, the only integer for which [this is true](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_x%CA%B8%3Dy%CB%A3). Of course it's actually provable that [all numbers are interesting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox) though someday if Spencer gets [lucky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_number) he'll prove that 69 is the [most interesting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/69_%28sex_position%29). [back]

18: ['As the ox turns'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon). Ploughing a, uh, field. For the, um, sowing of seeds. [back]

19: A [preliminary literature review](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22semantic+domain%22+profanity) finds little of relevance but, given that despite Hotch's familiarity with religious concepts he shows no sign of religiosity, it's possible that just as Labov's seminal [sociolinguistic study on Martha's Vineyard](http://www.mvtimes.com/2011/08/16/50-years-language-study-began-marthas-vineyard-6918/) found certain sounds indicative of resistance to social changes, so the use of blasphemy may indicate that at a formative age Hotch was resisting— This veers towards profiling so instead Spencer notes that the [pubococcygeus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pubococcygeus_muscle) is the primary muscle engaged when performing Kegel exercises. [back]

20: Specifically [_pars pro toto_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche). [back]

21: Author's note: Trying to find the name of the [graph Reid's thinking of here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbola#Rectangular_hyperbola) was the second time in as many years I've had to consult my old high school geometry notes for a fanfic. (The other fanfic is far less pornographic and also far less finished.) I apologise to all my maths teachers past for ever doubting the vital nature of the subject. [back]

22: The use of the [present tense to describe (ir)regularly occurring actions](http://grammar.about.com/od/fh/g/Habitual-Present.htm), as in "Every week or three Spencer comes to Hotch's apartment," or "Apparently sometimes Hotch comes on the couch." [back]

23: Author's note: The ambiguity of [anaphors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_%28linguistics%29) is the bane of the slash writer: should one man tangled with another in the bedsheets wish to touch 'his cock', whose cock exactly is the antecedent he desires? Latin addressed this problem by using "suum phallum" to refer to his own, "eius phallum" to refer to his partner's, and (it must be admitted less romantically) "illius phallum" to refer to that of some other man mentioned somewhat earlier. However [slashfic written in Latin](http://archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Btitle%5D=&work_search%5Bcreator%5D=&work_search%5Brevised_at%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=0&work_search%5Bsingle_chapter%5D=0&work_search%5Bword_count%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=41&work_search%5Bfandom_names%5D=&work_search%5Brating_ids%5D=&work_search%5Bcategory_ids%5D%5B%5D=116&work_search%5Bcategory_ids%5D%5B%5D=23&work_search%5Bcharacter_names%5D=&work_search%5Brelationship_names%5D=&work_search%5Bfreeform_names%5D=&work_search%5Bhits%5D=&work_search%5Bkudos_count%5D=&work_search%5Bcomments_count%5D=&work_search%5Bbookmarks_count%5D=&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=&work_search%5Bsort_direction%5D=&commit=Search) has a limited audience these days. [back]

24: Pants on the other hand are only topologically equivalent to a [double torus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus#n-fold_torus) if they don't have any belt loops; if they do then they're topologically equivalent to the contents of [a box of glazed doughnuts](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/26/topologically-equivalent-_n_1170182.html). [back]

25: The basic problem of [knot theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory) is the recognition problem, but Spencer's problem is that recognising that this knot should be a pair of boxers doesn't actually tell him how to transform the one into the other. [back]

26: Pre-internet, one of the easiest ways for a precocious, socially disconnected teenager to indulge his curiosity about the human form was to browse the [ND section](https://www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/classification/lcco/lcco_n.pdf) of the university library. Even [Caillebotte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Caillebotte)'s nudes aren't very explicit, but Spencer still likes [_Les raboteurs de parquet_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_raboteurs_de_parquet) anyway. [back]

27: Different speakers would make different judgements but [this table](http://safalra.com/other/any-every-no-some/) is a well-referenced start. [back]

28: [27](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_%28number%29) would be a nice number to end on, being a perfect cube in the form 3 3. On the other hand [28](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_%28number%29) is not just a perfect number but a happy one too. [back]


End file.
